This is part of diary entries I kept while traveling abroad in Hong Kong and Macau in 2001, and later expanded upon with more explanation and detail.
I am hot and it's muggy, and I wonder if the entire trip will be in this kind of weather. I have a sneaking suspicion it will; Hong Kong is considerably south of Knoxville in the global scale of things, and it's nearly April. I took the first of many deep breaths that I would inhale over the next month, and none of them ever felt quite completed. It was as though I couldn't quite get my lungs full because of the oppressive moisture and smog blanketing the place.
Tammy and I shared a room at the hotel last night. It was expensive (though not for us of course), though it seemed to be pretty standard in my experience with double rooms. There were two twin beds, small and hard-mattressed, and a bathroom with electrical outlets resembling Mission Control (ah, my kingdom for federal standardization!). There's a club on the third floor, the Pink Mau Mau, that Tammy and I eyed speculatively on our way up, but when we got to our room we decided it was too much effort to move.
"Are you going to that club?" I asked her.
She rolled her eyes and yawned. "I'm going to bed."
Nearest the window in bed, later, I rolled onto my side and looked out at the sky-high buildings fronting the hotel, feeling suddenly trapped. I've always liked cities, but for some reason this just felt enclosing, tightening on me physically. It's not homesickness; my family has been occasionally vexed, I suspect, by how little longing for home actually affects me. Maybe I'm just used to having a view of some sort, and the sight of nothing but windows and concrete is unnerving. I chalked it up to no sleep and immediately remedied it by dropping off into a heavy slumber.
I start off this morning with some more of that jasmine tea, provided in our room with a little coffeepot and packets of raw sugar, while Tammy roots around the bathroom for the hotel hair dryer, after discovering her $24 box of outlet adaptors didn't have one that was compatible. We meet Ted, Sheila, and April in the hotel cafe for breakfast, which consists of buttery croissants – far and away the most popular item with our little quintet – fresh fruit from the Philippines, cereal, juices, and congee. Congee is a thick, soupy rice, often flavored with some sort of meat stock, chicken in this case. For some reason, I am the only one to have it, though I find it as delicious as homemade chicken soup in many respects.
Back in our room, we are just about ready to go when a small Filipino housekeeper knocks at the door. She smiles and nods at us, then goes to the television cabinet. Opening the bottom panel, she reveals a small refrigerator and proceeds to do a quick inventory for our bill, then leaves. Tammy and I look at one another in mutual surprise. "I didn't know it was there," I explain.
Our investigation turns up several cans of Coca-Cola, 7-Up, various snacks, and small bottles of liquor. Tammy ladles two cans of Coke and a bottle of water into her backpack, which she later reports at the front desk while we are checking out. We wait for her in a semi-circle on a couple of sofas near the front door; outside, Jack is speaking in rapid Cantonese with a man driving a hotel bus, negotiating for his parking so we could load up to head for the boat dock.
Returning to our group, Tammy clearly has something on her mind. "How much was it?" someone asks.
"About $11." That didn't seem so bad, considering the exchange rate is 8-to-1. "You don't understand," she enlightens us. "That's $11 American." From then on, those two sodas bore the brunt of our negotiating triumphs in shopping markets – "Oh? Well, at least I didn't pay 11 bucks for a couple of Cokes" – when we compared how much we'd spent on purses, or scarves and ties at different vendor stands. (This was doubly humorous because of the five of us, Tammy turned out to be the most ruthless negotiator.)
Jack gestures at various points of interest on the way to the dock, where we were to take a ferry to Macau, approximately 40 miles west of Hong Kong. Car dealerships are located on the bottom floor of skyscrapers, and the entire lot is enclosed in the showroom; if you wanted something they couldn’t fit in there, you had to order it. Someone informed us later in our stay that the cost of buying a car was almost three times what it would be in the U.S., once the purchase price, taxes, and other fees are taken into account.
People were walking everywhere. Sidewalks were crowded, outdoor escalators and stairwells were packed. The island is only about the size of Chicago proper, but while the Windy City housed about 2 million people, nearly 7 million were crammed into Hong Kong. Ted became fond of making the comparison that Hong Kong's 400 square miles are only a hundredth of the size of Tennessee, with nearly twice the number of people as that state. To put it in even more perspective, it's not many fewer than the population of New York City.
After he buys our round-trip tickets at the ferry office, Jack leaves us on our own and promises to see us in six days. We immediately run into a minor problem with baggage handlers insistent on loading our suitcases separately, after weighing them to be sure they will pass muster. On board the ferry, we notice there are people wheeling their luggage into the seating area, and begin to suspect that we’ve been had by the baggage handlers. The feeling intensifies after we arrive at Macau's dock and have to pay about $15 U.S. to rescue our bags. It isn’t a lot of money, granted, but it could become a problem if little things like this keep cropping up for 30-some days.
Once again we're handed little slips of paper on which to record our immigration information – just basic data including our names, passport numbers, destination, birthdates, and the like. Visiting between Hong Kong island and Macau isn't a simple matter of motoring back and forth across a strait of the Pacific; when China took over Hong Kong from the British in 1997 and Macau from the Portuguese in 1999, it established each as a Special Administrative Region – Hong Kong for half a century and Macau for 30 years – which effectively turned each into its own province. As a result, to even step across to the political mainland from Macau requires paperwork.
Writing this years later, I am struck by how much has changed in our post-Sept. 11 world. I admit I don’t know how strict the immigration folks have become in Macau and Hong Kong since then, but it seems unthinkable that we could now wheel our luggage through without having to open it to inspectors – yet, that’s exactly what we did while there in March 2001. Perhaps being associated with the Rotary carries more significance there; all I know is I live in a country where little old ladies have to abandon their pacemaker-wearing husbands in wheelchairs so they can turn their shoes inside out for airport security these days.
Rotarians in Hong Kong, Macau, and Mongolia (the club was not yet officially recognized in China itself) were business owners and leaders, much as are their American counterparts. In the U.S., one can be a business owner and still not terribly rich; in China, this was not the case, at least not 17 years ago. For this reason, since we were living and mingling with mostly Rotarians, we were largely exposed to wealthy people's points of view.
This becomes important when considering how recent takeovers had affected the populace of Hong Kong and Macau while we were there. Most of the people with whom we spoke during our stay told us very little had changed under Beijing's rule. Hong Kong business people, especially, explained that since their city was already a prosperous international trade center by 1997, the national government had kept a mostly hands-off policy, operating on common sense: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
At least until 2047.
September 4, 2018